Thursday of the Fourth Week of Lent

Lectionary: 247

“Go down at once to your people 
whom you brought out of the land of Egypt, 
for they have become depraved. 
They have soon turned aside from the way I pointed out to them, 
making for themselves a molten calf and worshiping it, 
sacrificing to it and crying out, 
‘This is your God, O Israel, 
who brought you out of the land of Egypt!’

The first words of today’s reading should evoke, for any American, the spiritual, “Go down, Moses.” It has been recorded many times, but especially by Paul Robeson and Louis Armstrong. The song recalls the tragic history of slavery in America, and the hope African Americans found in the religion of their oppressors.

But in today’s reading, the words “Go down, Moses” appear in a different context. Rather than Egyptian or American slavery, they remind us of the slavery of sin, the slavery to one’s own desires, needs, fears, and prejudices. We are often shackled by dispositions we take for granted, by assumptions that seem as natural as the rain but, in fact, bind us to sin.

There is, of course, a political context to this account from Exodus. Although this book of the Pentateuch recalls the sojourn in the desert, the “molten calf” refers to the statues King Jeroboam of Israel established in Bethel and Dan. These images were supposed to resemble the God who had delivered them from Egypt, although they bore a striking similarity to the idols of the local Canaanites. The king demanded his people’s religious loyalty and discouraged their pilgrimages to Judah and Jerusalem. The opening verses of Tobit, among other passages in the Bible, recalls the terrible consequence, Israel was invaded and destroyed by the Assyrians.

The severed kingdom's reverence for the golden calves represented the national sin of infidelity. Tobit assures us that the people knew what the king intended and why. If the majority accepted his duplicity and patronized his shrines, God's faithful people still went to Jerusalem.

I recall this sad story to remind us that our guilt is never entirely personal. Just as we are saved through the fellowship of the Church, the body of Christ, so can we sin by a false loyalty to neighborhoods, cities, states, and nations. 

Christians are called to be a people peculiarly his own, and Tobit admirably demonstrates the privilege and cost of this blessing. It falls upon the conscience of every Christian to practice loyalty to homeland with fidelity to our religious tradition. We balance these relationships by a close attention to God's Holy Spirit. One Christian may enlist in a nation's armed services as a warrior; another might espouse pacifism; a third might volunteer time and energy to the homeless, the imprisoned, the dying, or the unborn. 

"For freedom Christ set you free!" Saint Paul declared to the Galatians. In the footsteps of Jesus we work out our salvation as we fulfill the duties the Spirit lays upon us. 

And we pray that God will deliver us from Covid-19.